Patent data can be a powerful tool and IP rights holders today have more access to it than ever before. It includes a vast quantity and quality of information. Qualitatively, the information is a multifaceted collection of varied technical disclosures, content of a legal nature, and government records. It contains both technical and everyday language, graphics, and reference citations.
Patent data was often only used by specific groups of professionals. However, today, it has much wider availability and usage.
Creating Value from Patent Data
The inadequacy of many existing approaches is unfortunate because when properly made available and analyzed, patent data has broad applications. This information can and should assist innovators, entrepreneurs, established businesses, and patent asset management firms alike.
Patent data also aids sensible decision-making for industry, government, and academia – look no further than Japan, China, and Taiwan, where governments rely on patent information to craft science, technology, and industrial policies. Below, we will briefly address various contexts in which this data can support decision-makers.
Science and Technology Policies
Patent data can represent technology’s global context and trends. It can also support industry and academia to properly allocate R&D budgets that are used to conduct basic and applied research; build momentum for the next round of industrial transformation; and focus development in much-needed technical areas such as material science, biology, wireless communications, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Patent data can identify emerging technologies or organizations affecting or disrupting established industries or traditional investment and M&A networks, or old supply chains. Such examples include:
- The impact of light detection and radar and advanced driver-assistance systems on the self-driving car industry.
- Artificial intelligence’s impact on the software and hardware industry.
- The effect of biotechnology in the pharmaceuticals and medical treatment field.
- The impact of microLED on the display and lighting industry.
- Robot technology’s impact on manufacturing and agriculture businesses.
- Blockchain’s impact on the financial technology sector.
Innovators and Start-ups
Patent data has the potential to help entrepreneurs choose R&D subjects with precision, implement R&D strategies effectively and connect entrepreneurs to various industry, M&A, and supply chain networks. Patent data can also help to overcome start-up risks and failures. Examples include:
- Security and cryptography technology as applied to online payments.
- Big data technology as applied across industries.
- Sensor technology as applied to fields such as medical devices, robotics, and the Internet of Things.
- Algorithms as applied to business modeling.
Mergers and Acquisitions
Patent data can depict with specificity the global competitive landscape in technology, products, and patent assets. Patent data will facilitate mergers and acquisitions in the industry and reshape the markets and competition profiles. For example, Foxconn Group invested in Lytro’s light field imaging platform technology and, through its Sharp acquisition, also obtained access to 5G standard-essential patents and display technologies. Qualcomm’s NXP acquisition gave it ownership of products, customers, and patents outside the communications field. Intel acquired Mobileye to own products, customers, and patents in the self-driving car sector.
Technology Trends
Patent data can reveal global context and trends for technologies, products, and patent assets to accurately predict future market needs in product and technology features — thus enabling better planning and efficient resource management. Trending technologies include artificial intelligence, 5G, IGZO, autonomous aerial vehicles, biopharmaceuticals, and digital medical devices.
Patent Asset Management
Patent data can be used to map the technical content and context of global patent assets as a whole — as well as the distribution and relatedness of these assets. It can also be used as a means to deploy quality patent assets from various countries to form high-value patent portfolios.
Products with significant market shares and high gross margins can be developed to support high-quality and high-value patent portfolios. It can also be used to run patent monetization programs to obtain royalty, sales revenue, or cross-license benefits.
Furthermore, it can support patent professionals in managing global patent risk and creating solutions from technological, commercial, and legal perspectives.
A Way Forward
There are many beneficial uses for properly prepared patent data, but many existing approaches to this discipline fail to produce actionable intelligence. In response to these challenges, big data companies specializing in patents provide an opportunity to solve these problems.
To analyze patent data from multiple countries, these companies use semantic, natural language processing, cross-language, image searches, machine learning, and other big data analysis techniques incorporated into software and big data solutions. Additionally, they develop algorithms that analyze patent quality and patent value.
Moreover, applying artificial intelligence technology to patent analytics will help identify and measure potential errors by an inventor, patent attorney or agent, or patent examiner — thus helping to prevent the dark side of patent data from worsening. It will also help to significantly lessen the number of patents granted by focusing on quality and value rather than quantity. This will go a long way towards restoring proper respect for other people’s patents.
To discover more about the value of high-quality patent data and how it can benefit you, visit Patentcloud today for a free trial.
